Fine Art, Contemporary Painting by Elizabeth A Fox

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I have been making a set of small paintings, wax encaustic and watercolour. they are ACEO size, which is 2.5 x 3.5 inches. some of them are abstract and some are small versions of some of my larger works. You can see them all by looking under the ACEO tab at the top of the page and some of them are making their way into my gallery Elizabetha Fox

The Iceland Series of Paintings is based on my Visit to Iceland. Here is an extract from my diary of the visit to the interior wilderness of Icelnd – Sprengisandur. The Diary can be seen in my blog Not at Home on WordPress

The Sprengisandur Wilderness is so barren that every time a discernible feature appears I spring up with the camera, to record this unusual occurrence. Some rocks, a valley, a pool of milky water. Eventually a very large dam of pale green water receding forever into the mist, which is punctuated by pylons. The road improves, the bus whizzes over the rutted surface, flying across narrow bridges spanning the green milkstuff. We stop at a hotel, the second of two, the first being the ‘Highland Hotel’ – not half. A stop where we must all take off our shoes and pay £2.50 to visit the toilet.

Once again the bus turns onto a rutted black lava-sand track, the bumpiest of the lot, travelling as it does over unyielding lava flows. We can tell we are nearing Landmannalaugar when we see bright green moss carpeting the hills; the appearance is of a sci-fi unearthly place, maybe as in Tolkien’s poem;

“The world was young,
The mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone
When Durin woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.”

Multicoloured hills appear, in those volcanic colours we are growing accustomed to, and then the camp-site. We had anticipated that it would be crowded, but not that is would be a dingy, maybe even squalid patch of stony bog-ridden mud, plagued with tents, a ring of buzzing and roaring Jeeps around the edges.

Disembarking, keeping our luggage out of the mud and trudging to reception, has the flavour of WW1 soldiers arriving at Vimy Ridge or some other far flung trench, to burrow a shelter from the wind and make a home for themselves in the muddy fields.

In the rain, we put up the tent by a small river, or ditch, and looking out we can see a tiny snipe bobbing up and down – its head going like those woodpecker toys. There are three sheep across a boggy meadow and a crowd of undressed people beside a waft of steam in the middle of this meadow.

Sprengisandur is only accessible during summer and is impassable in winter because of the snow, and in spring because of floods. In medieval times, the area derived its name from the fact that for hundreds of kilometers, there was no fodder for horses, and no human habitation to take shelter in. This feature gave the area its name: it is derived from Icelandic noun sandur “sand”, which denotes the volcanic ash deserts of the center of the island, and the verb sprengja that means “to ride a horse to death; to be on the point of bursting after running for too long”. One needed to ride as fast as possible, nearly driving the horses to death, to cross the mountain desert and reach the inhabited regions of the island again before one ran out of victuals.

An original small oil painting of the cranes around the canals at Media City in Salford Quays, in Manchester. I find the architecture of this city an exciting subject to paint, because of the way that the old and the new is growing together and changing. Media City is entirely new, having replaced traditional houses along the network of canals and the river with this modern settlement. I love to go here to draw and photograph the shapes and light as it falls on the strange structures.

I have used an expressive thick impasto style with the brush strokes so that the oil paint is quite thick and in relief in places.

The painting is on a small acrylic mirror sheet, and has been drawn through in places to allow the reflective quality to shine through. The effect is quite subtle, and is visible only in some of the lines drawn into the paint. The mirror is a Perspex one, so it will not break. the painting would need to be mounted before it could be hung as there is no way to fix hangings on the back of the mirror tile.

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Not At Home – My Painting Inspiration : not at home

Walk Bec de Morgiou via the Cret de Moriou and climb at Les Abricotier. We walk in the morning, enjoying seeing what we only saw in darkness last night. A steep path leads up to the col, looking down into the idyllic small port of Sormiou and out along the isthmus of the Bec de […]

Saturday, 26 December On the day our departure for Morgiou, we woke up to flood sirens sounding; it’s been raining all night and all the previous day. Last night (Christmas Day) Jim had to interrupt celebrations by going to move things from the ground floor of his house, afraid of flooding while we were away. […]

Monday 11 July Cinque Torri climbing and Averau Via Ferrata We get up at 5 o’clock to leave early so that we can climb Averau before breakfast. The Via Ferrata is quite steep for a grade two. Nobody is about as we pass the Averau Hut, walk round the back and start scrambling up towards […]

Sunday 10 July We visit Cinque Torre to stay overnight. The cable car takes us up through the meadows and over the trees. Our room is a very large one with the balcony and a window looking directly onto the towers. Itching to go and look at them, we go out straight away, climbing at […]

I interrupted writing about the Dolomites while I made a lot of paintings of mountains, some from the Dolomites, and many from Scotland and the Cuillin Ridge. I was experimenting with a new technique using wax and inks, which gives an almost print like quality to the work, and also seems to represent the actions […]